The UDistrict has many great eating places from wings and pizza to Mediterranean food. Restaurants such as Brother Juniper's and CK's coffee shop are great places to eat breakfast and to start the day off right. Many restaurants like RP Tracks are trying to find a way to satisfy all types of customers. That's why recently they have added barbecue tofu to their menu to attract vegan and vegetarian customers.

The Eckles-Madison Family Cemetery on Carnes Avenue does not look like much of a threat during the winter with trees bare and vines limp from the cold. But the Normal Station neighborhood knows it’s only a matter of time before the flora emerge out of hibernation and take back the lot.

Come spring break, however, college students from Florida will spend the week clearing the lot.

TK Buchanan, community safety liaison for the University of Memphis, said the property, which is just off Echles Street, has been a problem for more than 100 years, especially during the summer when plants grow over the gravestones and into nearby properties.

“Literally, no one has ever taken care of it,” Buchanan said.

The cemetery was created just before the area was redeveloped for housing in the early 1900s, and approximately 14 members of the Eckles and Madison families are buried on the property.

Although Memphis city workers, local residents and Boy Scout troops would occasionally try to rehabilitate the lot, it was never enough.

“Basically what they do is remove the litter or dumping and leave,” Buchanan said. “There’s nothing else that they can do without heavy equipment, a plan and some resources.”

Holly Lissner stood on the vacant Carnes Avenue lot strewn with trash and grown over with poison ivy and imagined what the abandoned family cemetery could become.

“I have an obsession with cemeteries,” admitted Lissner, former co-president of the Normal Station Neighborhood Association. “Wherever I go, whether its Jamaica, New Orleans, Florida or Israel, I seek them out.”

Lissner said she first became interested in this particular cemetery, located in the 3700 block of Carnes, while studying anthropology at the University of Memphis and focusing on grassroots movements. The faculty encouraged her involvement in the neighborhood association. As a seven-year resident of the area, the cemetery has become something of a personal crusade.

“I’d like to see it registered as an historic site,” Lissner said. “Our only barrier has been establishing ownership.”

The Eckles-Madison Family Cemetery is a small cemetery located 50 feet south of Carnes Street, directly across the street from a duplex numbered 3764-3766 Carnes. The vacant lot is in the middle of the Normal Station neighborhood near the University of Memphis and is heavily overgrown with only a few headstones remaining. Jodie Davis, a resident in the Normal Station area, said that the cemetery has been abandoned for quite some time and feels that nobody has any respect for the graves on the land. “Kids hang out over here and people let their dogs use the bathroom in the lot,” Davis said. “I think its disrespect to those that are buried there to have it looking it like that and not keeping it up.”